Anyone Know What A Google Search (STARRED) IS?

I just searched google for "marketing" and all the results have a star next to them...
If you mean those same stars, here's google's own explanation about them:

"With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the
next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top
of your results when relevant. That means if you star the official websites for your favorite
football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl]"
Official Google Blog: Stars make search more personal

It's (probably) also a very good way for google to track better results, or -more precisely-
results that google users like enough (or more than other results) to want to keep track of
them.

Has anyone tested them? A nice test would be to have two identical pages with similar
result page position (page A and B) and get lots of different people to use google, search
for your aimed keyword (an odd one with few results should be easy enough to place
somewhere in the first pages) and only click on the star of, for example, page A. Then see
if in the following days the "favorited" page (as well as being displayed "in a special list...")
gets a better ranking... of course Google has all the ways to "defend" itself from exploitation
so it should be done smartly and possibly moderately... but, hey, however little effect that
star might have it's worth exploring... what is little to google can sometimes have dramatic
effects on a smaller business ;°)

Hope this helped!

cheers,
Saul

My pleasure.

I also found this interesting article (more like research paper) by some google people,
from the 4th Int'l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. It's a pdf file:

Star Quality: Aggregating Reviews to Rank Products and Merchants
Mary McGlohon∗†, Natalie Glance†, Zach Reiter†
†Google, Inc, Pittsburgh PA ∗ Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

The stars seems to have appeared around March, this paper is from May
and it tells more about 5-star ranking system, which I think they might have
decided to "uber-simplify" (in classic google style) to make it more usable...

Just for fun, here's the kind of math they use only to talk about a 5 star
review system:
qi = ˆp + z2 α/2 2n − zα/2 [ˆp ∗ (1 − ˆp) + z2 α/2/4n]/n (1 + z2 α/2/n)

...mmh... copy and paste does not seem to work well with advanced math...
ah well, check the file to see some weird (for my uneducated eye ;°) math!

And if they use that kind of math "just" for a 5 star review, imagine what their
ranking algorithm could be!!! lol

cheers,
Saul

Thank you Saul - That is very interesting - just kinda weird we have not heard anything about.